Restricting website access

Tell me, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about ranking a website? Content? Or maybe backlinks? I admit, both are crucial factors for positioning a website in search results. But they’re not the only ones. In fact, two other factors play a significant role in SEO – crawlability and indexability. Yet, most website owners have never heard of them. At the same time, even small problems with indexability or crawlability could result in your site losing its rankings. And that’s regardless of what great content or how many backlinks you have. What are crawlability and indexability? What affects crawlability and indexability? How to make a website easier to crawl and index? Tools for managing crawlability and indexability What are crawlability and indexability? To understand these terms, let’s start by taking a look at how search engines discover and index pages. To learn about any new (or updated) page, they use … [Read more...] about What are crawlability and indexability of a website?

This week, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), published the Guidance on the rules on use of cookies and similar technologies (link to pdf). The ICO is the UK’s authority “set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.”
According to the document:
The rules in this area are essentially designed to protect the privacy of internet users – even where the information being collected about them is not directly personally identifiable. The changes to the Directive in 2009 were prompted in part by concerns about online tracking of individuals and the use of spyware. These are not rules designed to restrict the use of particular technologies as such, they are intended to prevent information being stored on people’s computers, and used to recognise them via the device they are using, without their knowledge and agreement.
In the announcement post, Information … [Read more...] about UK On Cookie Compliance: Website Owners “Must Try Harder”

Don’t be alarmed if you received a warning from Google in your email today — many webmasters were alerted that “Googlebot cannot access your JavaScript and/or CSS files.” Google sent out this warning via Search Console, while also reminding them that Googlebot’s inability to access those files may result in “suboptimal rankings”. That sounds bad, but the good news is there’s an easy fix for it and implementing the fix end up helping your site. Here is the warning the full warning: “Google systems have recently detected an issue with your homepage that affects how well our algorithms render and index your content. Specifically, Googlebot cannot access your JavaScript and/or CSS files because of restrictions in your robots.txt file. These files help Google understand that your website works properly so blocking access to these assets can result in suboptimal rankings.” Blocking CSS and JavaScript has been a Google no-no since it … [Read more...] about “Googlebot Cannot Access Your JavaScript and CSS”

So you’re going to redesign and relaunch your website. Congratulations! That’s certainly a major undertaking. But before your relaunch is live, you may want to perform an SEO audit, just to be safe. A proper SEO audit identifies potential SEO pitfalls prior to launch, giving you time to get issues fixed before you replace your current website. Unlike a general SEO audit on your website, an audit for a relaunching site is a bit of a different animal because you’re looking at and comparing two different sites: the old site versus the newly designed site. Relaunch audits also come with their own set of challenges. Many of the tools used to perform an audit require a website to be accessible on the web to scan the site, but when you’re doing a redesign, the new website may be hidden behind password-protected gates or may be on an internal server, inaccessible to these tools. When performing a relaunch audit, I break it down into two main pieces: pre-launch and … [Read more...] about Relaunching your website? Don’t forget an SEO audit!

How good is the quality of your website, really? Here is a detailed list of questions every website owner should ask themselves. If the answer to every question below is yes, give yourself a big ole pat on the back. Most websites have flaws for some different reasons, mostly related to the limitation of resources. This 50 question long questionnaire might trigger something here and there for some of you or may bring some forgotten item from the long to-do list back into your mind.
Is content structurally separate from navigational elements? Is the website optimized for mobile? How compliant is the website with W3C coding standards? Valid HTML/CSS? Are ‘alt’ tags in place on all significant images? Are text-based alternatives in place to convey essential information if this is featured within images or multimedia files?
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Are links labeled with anchor text that provides a clear indication of where they lead without over using exact match anchor text? Depth … [Read more...] about 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website